The approach to Pepys mooted here is different from that usually adopted. The typical interpretive strategy starts with a man named Pepys, held in a state of suspended animation, and looks for transhistorical human qualities in an apparently straightforward quotidian record. This article has advocated turning this orthodoxy on its head, beginning with the diary as text, and always keeping an eye on the wider context no matter how enthralling the revelations written for (not of) a particular day might seem.

Perhaps part of our problem is that we know how the story of Pepys ends. As we read the diary we see, in our mind's eye, the well-heeled, more self-assured individual who had established himself as a member of genteel society by the time of his death, not the son of a tailor and washerwoman who faced an uncertain future as he penned his diary some thirty...